Premium Bonds

Got any savings in Premium Bonds? How much can you expect to win?

For our non-UK visitors, Premium Bonds are a UK government backed product from National Savings and Investments.

These figures are based on April 2009, at which point the total prize fund was £32,200,000, and the odds of any one bond winning any one prize was set to 36,000 to 1.
(Details from the NS&I site here).

The prize fund of £32,200,000 is split into three parts.
6% of which goes to "Higher value prizes" (prizes of £5,000 and above),
5% goes to "Medium value prizes" (£1,000 and £500 prizes), and the final
89% to "Lower value prizes" (£100, £50 and £25 prizes ).

This means it's split into (approximately) the following manner:

Prize

No of prizes

Odds

Higher Value(6% of prize fund)

£1,000,000

1

1 in 38,926,584,000

£100,000

2

1 in 19,463,292,000

£50,000

4

1 in 9,731,646,000

£25,000

7

1 in 5,560,940,571

£10,000

19

1 in 2,048,767,579

£5,000

37

1 in 1,052,069,838

Medium Value(5% of prize fund)

£1,000

644

1 in 60,445,006

£500

1,932

1 in 20,148,335

Lower Value(89% of prize fund)

£100

17,196

1 in 2,263,700

£50

16,164

1 in 2,408,227

£25

1,045,288

1 in 37,240

Totals

£32,220,000

1,081,294

Note: I say "approximately" because the above figures are worked out by whatsthecost.com depending on the prize fund, which changes from month to month. Although they appear to match with the National Savings data, it's possible they may be slightly out